Before I came to San Diego I had been staying in Long Beach but since I'm going back there I haven't posted details for that yet. So chronologically this one is slightly out of order, but you'll just have to deal with it.

After several days of mostly lazing around in Long Beach I managed to find some energy to get out and see somewhere that had been on my original list of places to visit: San Diego, California. I had been told by several people that it is very beautiful and a really nice place to visit, in contrast to LA which is a top tourist destination for things like Disneyland, Universal Studios, Hollywood, Venice Beach, and so on, but would never be called 'nice'.

So I jumped on a Greyhound bus - the first in quite a long time - and did the short two hour ride down to San Diego. I had a hostel to stay in, which was okay. To start with there was nobody else in the four bed room I was put in. I even went to bed on the first night believing I had effectively got a private room, but 15 minutes after I went to bed somebody else checked in late and took another of the beds. On my first evening I went for a wander around town. I started going straight out to Seaport Village, a collection of shops and restaurants on the bayside. From there I walked up past the USS Midway, a few old ships, some lovely posh private cruise ships, and then I turned back inland before I ended up walking all the way back to LA. I passed through Little Italy on my way back towards downtown and it was great with so many restaurants and lots of people milling around on the streets. It's the best Little Italy I've seen.

I was very lucky that my cousin Adam hooked me up with a friend of his who is a native born-and-bred San Diegan. Stephanie, that was her name, picked me up on my first full day and showed me around town a bit before she had to get to work. We hit Cabrillo National Monument - I used my annual pass to get us in for free and she reciprocated by telling me she knew nothing about the place. So we learned together that it was a monument dedicated to the first European to land on the west coast of what is now the United States, back in the 1500s. The park had a dual purpose because it was also preserving an old lighthouse that we were able to look around.

We saw some seals lazing on a beach before eating lunch in the beautiful Old Town, which is a 15 minute trolley ride away from the present downtown. As the name suggests this was the original centre of town when San Diego was built, but later on they decided to relocate a little further south, probably (in my opinion) to be near the bay. There are a plethora of Mexican restaurants around - San Diego is only 15 miles from the Mexican border so there's a strong influence, plus California used to be part of Mexico historically - and we ate in one that Stephanie knew was nice. Luckily, it turned out, Stephanie was a really nice person, and very friendly, and what she lacked in knowledge about national monuments she made up for in effort.

She dropped me off mid-afternoon because she actually had some work to do and couldn't spend forever showing me around. I was at the USS Midway, a post-World War II aircraft carrier that has seen action in Vietnam and the first Gulf War. I've been on a few battleships and submarines on this trip but this was my first ever aircraft carrier. I had just over two hours until it closed and still I didn't get to see everything on the audio tour. The tour took me around the hangar deck, below decks to the crew's quarters, mess halls and so on, and then up to the flight deck where there were about twenty planes and helicopters to look at. I just made it onto the last tour of the day to go inside the island superstructure and see the bridge and flight control. The only thing I didn't have time to do was to listen to the audio guide on most of the planes up top, but I saw them and that was enough for me.

On my second day I went to San Diego Zoo. I very nearly had a half price ticket. On the day I arrived I had to kill some time before I was allowed to check in so I crossed the street from my hostel and just went in the nearest place for some lunch. It would make me look bad to say where I went so I'll just say that it rhymes with Scooters and is famous for a couple of big things. I had some very nice food and beer and as I sat at the bar looking through the flyers I had picked up in the hostel one of the waitresses, waiting to pick up the drinks for one of her tables, saw me and the zoo flyer and asked if I was going there. I turned to talk to her, noting that her name was Danielle (because her name-tag was a lot closer to me than her face, if you follow me), and, being careful not to let me gaze fall, I told her that, yes, I was planning to go. She asked me if I wanted a half price ticket because her cousin works for the zoo and gave her free tickets that she'll never get the chance to use and so she had decided she might as well get some money for them. Deciding that this was not a criminal deal I said I was interested and she went off to get a ticket, but when she got back she told me she'd had them so long they had expired. And that is how I nearly got a half price ticket.

So when I got to the zoo I used my $3-off coupon from the rack in the hostel and went in. I spent a few hours in there and saw: flamingos, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, a tiger with her three cubs (awww), hippos, polar bears, many types of bird, different species of bear, lions, giraffes, elephants, kangaroos, camels, koalas, snakes and giant tortoises. But, by far, my favourite were the giant pandas. They are the first pandas I've seen in person and they were so cute, especially as there was a mother and baby.

Overall I liked the zoo but I found myself wondering, as in Omaha zoo so long ago, whether it was cruel. Some of the enclosures seemed far too small and sparse for the size of the animal. Also I found it hard to navigate around because there were so many paths and the signs just pointed how to get to the main exhibits but that didn't help tell me exactly where I was. Also there was no sensible way to get around and see everything without doubling back a couple of times. That is a minor point but when it's 80 degrees in the middle of the day and you're walking up a steep path it becomes increasingly relevant.

When I was done in the zoo I walked through Balboa Park where the zoo was situated, slightly out of downtown. Well, strictly speaking I walked down the row of buildings and didn't see any open parkland, but it's out there apparently. I was blown away with how beautiful the buildings were. It's all Spanish style buildings with a few plazas. This is the area where all the museums are, although I didn't have time to visit any.

The reason I had no time was that I had to get back to my hostel in time to be picked up by Stephanie's boyfriend, Joe, and taken to Stephanie's house for a BBQ. I had been the reason for a random Tuesday evening BBQ. I got to meet her Canadian neighbours and a couple of her friends. I had a really good time that evening and everyone was so nice. It's one of those moments where I looked around and thought to myself how unlikely it was that I'd be sitting in someone's garden in San Diego eating a hot dog and drinking wine and talking to these people, and that it is good how random things like this have happened to me on this trip. (Incidentally, I brought along some wine, as all good guests do, and had chosen some from Sonoma County where I had stopped for my wine tasting.)

On my final day I had deliberately chosen a 6pm bus back to LA so that I got an extra day in town and I spent it at Sea World. I had debated whether to go there - it was one thing that had brought me to town in the first place but it's quite expensive. In the end I went for it. I had another coupon, this time for $5 off. The main draw for Sea World is the killer whale show where we learn about these magnificent creatures through 'natural behaviour' such as jumping out of the water in a backflip and then deliberately splashing the audience so that the first fifteen rows got soaked. That's why they call it the Soak Zone, and that's why I was in the upper section. The show was put on with all the glitz and dramatic music of a Las Vegas show and it was very good. Even if it's not whales in their natural environment they're still extremely impressive.

As soon as the whale show was over there was a fifteen minute gap before the dolphin show started across the park, so I high-tailed it over there. I managed to get ahead of the crowds because a few minutes after I was seated a massive influx of people started coming in. I think someone really messed up with the scheduling there. It was more of the same good stuff, with none of the glitz, as dolphins jumped around and splashed the audience. They had got a volunteer family up to take part in the show. Towards the end when the little girl was having her dolphin encounter the father slipped on the bridge where he was watching from and fell into the water. There was a moment of excitement as the audience screamed and the dolphin wranglers (my term for them) got him to swim away from the side. But when the dolphins started jumping over him as he swam I realised he was a plant. Not a dandelion, but a stooge, and not Larry, Moe or Curly, he was actually the head dolphin trainer. Very clever, you guys, you got me!

Aside from the shows there were several exhibits to look at animals. There was an arctic area that started with a simulator ride where we all took a 'helicopter' trip through the arctic in a helicopter that had whisper mode for its blades so that we could land at a spitting distance from polar bears (I'm pretty sure they'd see us even if we were, somehow, silent) and it had snorkle mode so that we could dive underwater and see narwhals. Oh come on, this is ridiculous! But I guess the kids liked it. After that I could go on to see the white beluga whales, which I was mesmerised by, a walrus and some stationary polar bears. There was a penguin and puffin exhibit, a shark exhibit complete with walk-through tunnel, a manatee exhibit, a whole bunch of flamingos, a few aquariums with fish and stuff (you can tell I'm bored with these now), and finally a whole bunch of seals and sea lions crying for food very loudly as people tried throwing to them the dead fish purchased from the stand while evading the very agressive seagulls that tried to snatch it from their smelly hands.

I liked Sea World, although it was a bit over-priced, especially when you consider that, just like in the zoo, the food and drink is massively marked up. I had time before my bus to stop in Old Town and take a little time walking around it. It really did feel like a proper old settlement, like Colonial Williamsburg back in Virginia, and it had a very distinct Spanish feel.

The area of town where the hostel was situated was right in downtown in a part called the Gaslamp Quarter. No prizes for guessing why it's called that. The closest intersection to the hostel door was interesting in that it allowed diagonal pedestrian crossing. That's the first time I've come across that in the US. I thought the downtown was really good. There were dozens of restaurants and bars around and there were always plenty of people out on the streets. The only problem was trying to get to sleep at night. On my second and third nights there were a pair of street musicians across the street singing and playing electric keyboard and saxophone and they carried on until at least 1am and I could hear them through the closed window and ear plugs! Another good thing about San Diego was the weather - every single day I had blue skies and very warm temperatures.

Stephanie gets big thanks from me for her tour guiding and BBQ skills, and San Diego gets the thumbs up. I'm going back to Long Beach now and then, after a rest day, I'll be taken to Mexico by my cousins for the weekend. I just hope they're bringing me back too.